The wireless market is continuing to grow, and is now beginning to support a diverse set of applications (e.g., in addition to cellular telephones, it is now possible to purchase small hand-held devices such as the Palm VII™, which provide access to the Internet via a wireless connection to a service provider.) As part of the ongoing wireless development, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is working on a UMTS (universal mobile telecommunications system) Terrestrial Radio Access Network (UTRAN). (3GPP is a standards body comprising the European Telecommunication Standards Institution (ETSI) and several other international standards bodies. Additional information on 3GPP can be found at: “http://www.3gpp.org.”)
Currently, in UTRAN, data transmissions between a “Node B” (NB) (also referred to herein as a base station) and a radio network controller (RNC)) are defined by dedicated transport channel (DCH) frame protocol (FP) procedures (referred to in UTRAN as the Iub interface). (As used herein, both the NB and the RNC are also representative of wireless network elements.) In particular, the FP procedures define uplink (from an NB to an RNC) and downlink (from an RNC to an NB) data frames. Each data frame (uplink or downlink) comprises a header portion and a payload portion (also referred to as a protocol data unit (PDU)), and supports multiplexing a number of DCHs in the payload portion. Each DCH comprises transport blocks (TBs), which are the basic units used to convey data. The size and number of TBs in each DCH of a data frame is identified by an associated transport format indicator (TFI) in the header portion of the data frame. It should also be noted that these DCH FP procedures also apply to communications between RNCs (referred to in UTRAN as the Iur interface).